Sun Debuts New Sparc, Opteron Workstations

Published: January 30, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the servers made by Sun Microsystems have accounted for most of the noise that the Unix system supplier has made in the past decade, Sun got its start as a Unix workstation maker and it still believes that the workstation market is a key part of its product portfolio. While many Unix workstation customers have moved on to high-powered Wintel and Lintel PCs with beefed up graphics, some still need or prefer Unix machines, and a subset of these customers prefer or need a Sparc box.

That's why Sun still has an estimated 1 million-strong workstation installed base, says Rajesh Shakkarwar, senior director of workstations at Sun's Network Systems Group. He estimates that Sun sold about 2 million of its 64-bit Ultra family of workstations, and that about half of them are in use, and says further that Sun reckons it has sold somewhere between 4 million and 5 million workstations in the past 23 years. When you consider that Unix servers used to sell for many hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars and Unix workstations had an order of magnitude higher volumes than servers and sold for many tens of thousands of dollars, you can appreciate how important the Unix workstation business has been to all of the Unix players--particularly Sun. Without their RISC/Unix workstation businesses, they would have never been able to achieve the processor volumes necessary to make their RISC/Unix servers more attractively priced than proprietary midrange and mainframe alternatives. The workstation enabled the server. It is ironic that these days, it is the Unix server that is enabling the Unix workstation to persist.

According to Gartner data cited by Shakkarwar, Sun is the leader in Opteron-based workstation shipments, with nearly 14,000 units shipped in the third quarter of 2005, up from just over 8,000 units in the prior quarter and around 5,500 in the second quarter. That's over 27,000 units in the first three quarters of 2005 (all the data that is yet available for the year). Sun's growth in the Opteron-based workstations is on an exponential curve, and during the same period, the number two Opteron workstation shipper, IBM, with about 22,000 units (and a much slower growth rate). Hewlett-Packard is growing fast in the Opteron workstation market, having got a later start than Sun or IBM, but it only pushed just under 10,000 units in the same time. If you look at Gartner's data for Unix/Linux workstations from 2000 through the third quarter of 2005--nearly five solid years of data--Sun has 59 percent of the total shipments, compared to 16 percent for HP, 10 percent for IBM, and 8 percent for Dell (which doesn't have a RISC/Unix workstation, but does sell Xeon-based Linux workstations).

Workstations still matter to Sun, and maybe, as Sun's president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz has hinted a few times last year, Sun may be trying to push for a resurgence of the Unix workstation--with or without a RISC processor like the Sparc. Customers may buy the idea, particularly now that Solaris 10 can run on Opteron and Xeon processors. Why not? RISC processors offered more performance than X86 chips for years, and had special features for supporting advanced graphics, but today, high-end PCs have in many ways caught up. That doesn't mean customers won't prefer Solaris on such machines.

The Ultra 40 Opteron-based workstation that Sun announced today is not its first Opteron machine--Sun launched the ponderously named Sun Java Workstation W1100z (a uniprocessor) and the Sun Java Workstation W2100z (with two Opteron sockets) in July 2004 and the Ultra 20 developer workstation last fall, using the motherboard of a low-end "Galaxy" X2100 server. Sun seems to have ditched the Sun Java Workstation name--which was silly anyway--and returned to its Ultra roots. The new Ultra 40 does not use Galaxy motherboard tipped on the side, but rather has a unique board layout that was necessary to accommodate two Opteron 200 Series processors (either single-core or dual-core) as well as 16 GB of main memory, up to four 3.5-inch SATA drives, and six slots (two PCU, two PCI Express-x4, and two PCI Express-x16, the latter being for dual graphics cards). The machines can be equipped with the top-of-the-line 2D and 3D graphics cards from nVidia, and use the same brushed metal mini tower that made its debut with the Ultra 20 last year.

The machine comes with lots of free software, including Solaris 10 as well as Sun's own Java Studio Creator development environment, Java Studio Enterprise 8, Sun Studio 11, NetBeans, and Grid Engine 6 grid middleware all bundled on the box. If you want to pay for your software, the Ultra 40 can run the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Linux WS 3 and 4, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, and Microsoft Windows XP Pro. The machines come with a one year warranty, upgradeable for free to three years with a two-year paid extension beyond that. Sun is also peddling extra support services for Solaris, Linux, and Windows.

The base configuration of the Ultra 40 costs $2,295, and it includes an Opteron 200 processor, 1 GB of memory, an 80 GB SATA drive, an NVIDIA Quadro graphics card, and all that Sun software.

Sun also announced that the single-socket Ultra 20 workstation announced last summer can now support dual-core Opteron 100 Series processors. This workstation does not include Grid Engine in its bundle. It costs $895 with one Opteron 144, 512 MB of main memory, an 80 GB drive, and a 2D graphics card.

Finally, Sun has a vast installed base of Sparc workstation customers, and some of them are looking to get a new machine, too--particularly if their code has not yet been ported to the Opteron processor. To that end, Sun has announced the Ultra 45 workstation, which is very much like the Ultra 40 except that it used Sun's own single-core, 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors and its own XVR-2500 3D graphics card. It has two PCI Express-x16 slots, a PCI Expressx8 slot, and two PCI-X slots, and supports up to 16 GB of main memory and up to four SATA drives. The Ultra 45 comes with the same software stack installed the Opteron-based Ultra 40, but the warranty is not as generous and the price tag is quite a bit higher at $3,695 for a machine with 1 GB of memory, an 80 GB disk, and the base XVR graphics. Sun says that the Ultra 45 workstation has about 2.6 times the graphics performance of the prior Sun Blade 2500 workstation.

Shakkarwar would not say when or if Sun might put a dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ processor into a workstation, but given that this chip has a lot more oomph than the UltraSparc-IIIi, it would be a logical thing to do--particularly for customers with Sparc applications who don't want to port to Opteron. But, with supplies constrained on those chips, it was clear that Sun could not do it at this announcement. What is still unclear is if Sun will ever do it. All Shakkarwar would say is that Sun has plans for higher-performance Sparc workstations in the future.